Toronto band sets Globe and Mail’s March 30 edition to music

Enter the Haggis, a Toronto-based band, has raised over $57,000 through Kickstarter for an album that’s based entirely on the March 30 edition of the Globe and Mail. (The album comes out on March 30, 2013.)
The Globe and Mail’s front page headline that day was “Harper’s Modest Revolution” and the album’s title is “The Modest Revolution.” The band says on its Kickstarter page that it’s “been scouring the paper, solving crosswords, reading obituaries and pulling together ideas which are evolving into songs.” (Singer Brian Buchanan notes that Earl Scrugg’s obituary ran that day, “so that kind of writes itself.”)

The band explains how it got the music-based-on-newspaper-content idea:

Leafing through a local paper in a small town this past winter, we were struck by the sheer number of interesting story-lines we found. After some discussion, we hit on an unusual idea: why not capture a snapshot of a single day musically?

We knew we needed a newspaper from a major city to ensure that we’d have a wide variety of stories and topics to choose from. No problem there: ETH is from Toronto, which is the biggest and most culturally diverse city in Canada. Crazy stuff happens here every day! We bit the bullet and chose March 30th, 2012 as our “snapshot day” – and we ordered a WHOLE lot of copies of The Globe And Mail. [The March 30, 2012, issues all go to contributors.] This is what 1500 newspapers looks like:

UPDATE — ANOTHER KICKSTARTER SUCCESS STORY: A month ago I wrote about Kalamazoo journalist Chris Killian’s modest Kickstarter campaign — an attempt to raise $2,500 to tour the swing states in a VW bus to “get the pulse of the people.”

Killian’s campaign ended four days again and he raised $4,472. His proposal said that “PB&J’s are on the menu” but he’ll now be able to upgrade to steak sandwiches — or an occasional stop at a Days Inn for a shower and bed.